America, by contrast, is much wilder — with its mountains, deserts, hurricanes, bears and rattlesnakes. Unlike in the orderly UK, it’s easy to feel here as if the state has all but disappeared. Surely America’s vast landscape must play some role in shaping political life?

Certainly, following Donald Trump’s victory, it is impossible not to notice the profound contrast between the two countries. Over the last few years British politics has had a decidedly sad, small-country energy. Boris Johnson and “cash for curtains”, Liz Truss and the lettuce, Rishi Sunak in the rain, Keir Starmer snaffling free Taylor Swift concert tickets. In the US, on the other hand, we have an epic political drama that people will be writing about centuries from now. In the last three months, multiple assassins attempted to kill one candidate while plutocrats defenestrated a senile emperor so they could continue to exercise power through a talentless cypher. In a late plot twist, the plutocrats were thwarted, and now their nemesis is preparing to return to the seat of power. Clearly, this level of drama can only happen in a big country where people carve the faces of their greatest leaders into a mountain.

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The Californication of Texas

By Daniel Kalder

The physical environment shapes politics in other ways too. Consider the perpetual debate over gun rights and the Second Amendment, for instance. This is extremely perplexing to outsiders, partly because they do not understand the sacred role of the Constitution. But there is also a pragmatic reason for gun ownership, which I learned from my father-in-law, who grew up in the Texas panhandle. Out there, he told me, the counties are huge, and police are few and far between. Dial 911 and you might be waiting a long time for help to arrive. In a wilderness full of coyotes, snakes, and bears, you need to be able to protect yourself.

You see this sentiment reflected in American attitudes to hunting. When I was growing up in the UK, the image of a hunter was a toff in a red coat, perched on a horse, setting his dogs on a fox. In the US, there is still an element of man against nature, of waiting for hours to shoot dinner, or perhaps to take out a feral hog with razor-sharp tusks charging at you at 25 miles per hour. This is also why the Democrats sent their bumbling vice presidential candidate Tim Walz into a field with a gun: to demonstrate that he was worthy of the male vote, he had to inflict violence upon nature. When he was filmed struggling to load his weapon, he was mercilessly ridiculed, and instantly lost credibility.

Another way the landscape has shaped American politics is by its sheer scale. A large nation forges a different type of politician: to play the game of power in such an immense country, you must become big yourself. In Britain we have a vestigial memory of this; anyone who reads history cannot help but be struck by the fact that our imperial elites, fighting uprisings across the globe while translating Thucydides for amusement, seem like an alien species. Small island Britain no longer has need of such grandiose figures, and for decades has only produced mediocrities and nonentities. Americans, by contrast, have the confidence of a people who have conquered an epic landscape. Trump made his money by developing the land and erecting garish hotels on what was once wilderness. But he is only one rich man among many. America’s rulers know that there is much left to exploit, but you cannot do that if you go small, so the land forges grandiose liars, monumental crooks, and titanic phonies.

America’s landscape is abundant in resources, and this, too, plays out in political debates. In the UK, the case for renewable energy is bolstered by an understanding that resources are finite: one day the oil will run out, and that will be that. In America, though, there are deserts, forests, mountains, glaciers, swamps. How can a land so huge and diverse not feed itself, make its own cars, and produce its own energy? If you exhaust one area, you could just look elsewhere, or dig deeper, “drill baby drill”. This vastness also fuels a greater confidence in renewables. When I see a lone wind turbine in a field in the UK, I imagine it might just about provide enough power for a toaster. When I see the endless rows of turbines rotating slowly in the deserts of West Texas, I am struck by the transformative potential of the wind.

This sense of abundance also defines attitudes towards immigration. Economists may argue that mass immigration is necessary for growth, especially in the face of declining populations, but in Europe the emotional case is centred on inherited guilt: migrants should be welcomed as recompense for historical crimes of racism and imperialism. In America, the emotional case is more positive: it emphasises generosity, that there’s enough for everyone. “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” goes the poem by Emma Lazarus inscribed in bronze inside the Statue of Liberty. Pro-immigration arguments always point to the fact that America is a nation of immigrants, and that they should extend the good fortune their ancestors enjoyed to newcomers. Indeed, Matt Yglesias’s book One Billion Americans is predicated on America’s great abundance: not only could the land house one billion people, he argued, but this would lead to still greater riches. You could never make this argument on a small, crowded island such as the UK — nor in any European country, for that matter.

But just as America is blessed with great natural wealth, so it must regularly suffer the Wrath of God in the form of recurring natural disasters, such as hurricanes, forest fires and periodic earthquakes. These, too, have a direct impact on politics, although the extent of the political fallout of a disaster depends on which party is in power at the time. For instance, following Hurricane Katrina, George W. Bush’s administration was pilloried for weeks and then months; the inadequate disaster response was clear evidence of Republican perfidiousness and racism. Following Hurricane Helene, however, there was infinitely less coverage, as the Democrat’s media stenographers feared harming Kamala Harris’s chances of success in the election. Perhaps, now that she has been soundly defeated, they will develop a curiosity about what is happening in the affected regions.

These disasters also provide regional politicians with opportunities to demonstrate that they are effective in a crisis — if they fail, then their foes make hay. The ice storm that struck Texas in 2021, causing major power outages across the state, was still being used in political attack ads against Governor Greg Abbott two years later. When Kamala Harris argued that Ron DeSantis was refusing her calls and using the crisis to play political games, Joe Biden, perhaps bitter from his ousting, took the opportunity to undermine her by calling DeSantis “gracious”.

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Yet when all is said and done, I think that the American landscape’s ultimate contribution to US politics is something that is at the core of the American character: optimism. The belief that better days are ahead has been central to American politics for as long as I have been alive, from Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” to Barack Obama’s “Hope” to Kamala’s “Joy” and even Trump’s “Make America Great Again”. No matter how polarised American politics becomes, both Republicans and Democrats agree that a new dawn is always right around the corner. And as traumatised as the Democrats may currently be by their crushing defeat, I am confident that they too will soon lift their gaze from the smouldering ruins of the Kamala campaign and once again find hope.

Those who view America from the outside may find this optimism baffling. The same goes for those who live in coastal metropolises and spend far too much time online, succumbing to feverish fantasies that a new civil war is looming. Yet step outside the dysfunctional cities, leave behind the demented discourse and actually enter the landscape and you will find that a sense of renewal is never far away. It’s everywhere: on the edge of a great lake, in the desert, on top of a mountain, or simply driving past immense fields, teeming with crops. This land — diverse, abundant, wild — is still young. And this is why, for all the talk of the end of America, and despite the corrupt media and devious politicians, optimism keeps breaking through.

Despite the inevitable hand wringing in Westminster, however, Trump’s election provides a political opportunity for Starmer that, intriguingly, has not gone unnoticed inside No.10. From a purely partisan perspective, those close to Starmer see Kamala Harris’s crushing defeat not only as a personal rejection, but also as an ideological repudiation of the kind of progressivism she came to represent. In their view, Harris’s brand of “be more woke” liberalism is just as antithetical to the voters Labour needs here as it was to the voters the Democrats needed across the Atlantic.

To understand the tensions at the heart of the Starmer government over its response to Trump’s victory, it is important to distinguish between the historical, organisational and emotional ties between Labour and the Democrats, which sparked Trump’s ire during the presidential campaign, and the divergent political projects taking shape in London and Washington. Those close to Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer’s influential chief of staff, simply do not look to San Francisco, Washington or Ottawa for inspiration as Tony Blair might have done in the Nineties. Instead, they look to the solid and rather staid social democracies of northern Europe. To understand Starmerism, in other words, look to Copenhagen not California.

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The interesting question at the heart of this Labour government, however, is not so much what McSweeney’s vision of a successful Labour strategy looks like — for that much is clear — but how widely it is shared within the wider Labour movement. Beyond a few figures in No.10, who else shares McSweeney’s instinctive eye-rolling alienation with the obsessions and prejudices of North American liberalism and, somewhere in their soul, saw Harris’s defeat as deserved?

Fundamentally, many in Starmer’s No.10 believe that their “project” to remake the Labour Party, which started in opposition, is only half finished. To complete it, the party needs to develop far less instinctive sympathy with the kind of progressivism Harris represented — and far more sympathy with the ordinary concerns of Middle England. If the Labour Party is to be more than a Biden-style interregnum between periods of conservative rule, they believe, the party needs to be shaken out of its comfort zone on many of the issues which cost Harris in the election, from immigration to the wider “woke” wars dominating the post-mortems now being written about why her campaign failed.

Harris’s defeat, in short, is both a portent of what could happen to the Labour Party at the next election and a tool Starmer can use to stop that from happening, though only if he has the political skill to do so. Put bluntly, while President Trump will test Starmer’s diplomatic skills to the limit, his victory could help persuade a reluctant Labour Party that it needs to do far more to reassure voters that it shares their instincts. That, at least, is the theory.

None of that is to deny that on day-to-day issues, a Trump presidency will present Starmer with endless problems, which could sap energy from his premiership. When the deportations of undocumented migrants begin, Starmer will come under enormous pressure from his own party to condemn them. Imagine the moment it is discovered that a dual British citizen has been rounded up and separated from his children. Like Tony Blair, forced out of office because of his failure to condemn Israel’s war with Hezbollah in 2006, Starmer cannot run too far from the core instincts of the Labour Party. And yet, who knows what ramifications there will be for Starmer should he go to war against Trump on any particular issue.

All this makes Britain’s choice for the next ambassador to Washington vitally important. Right now, Peter Mandelson is being touted for the position. Appointing him would be a show of power from McSweeney — a close ally of Mandelson — putting the Foreign Office in the shade and raising questions about David Lammy’s influence, given his remarks about Trump as a “neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath”. Mandelson is a commercially-minded politician-cum-businessman — a mould well understood in Washington — with an expertise in global trade rules from his time as European Commissioner. It would be some irony, however, if Mandelson’s latest political reincarnation was to negotiate a new trading relationship for Britain that would not have been possible in the EU.

Trump’s victory is clarifying in more ways than one, however, challenging British politics to reveal its hand on a whole raft of issues beyond Brexit, trade and security. When the President-elect moves to reinforce his southern border, in what sense can Britain plausibly claim to hold a different policy given the emphasis Starmer has placed on the creation of a new “Border Force”? As Starmer put it in his conference speech earlier this year: “It is — as point of fact — the policy of this Government to reduce both net migration and our economic dependency upon it.” The difference between Starmer and Trump, then, is not one of ambition, but delivery. Similarly, when Trump moves to ban the surgical transition of trans children, as he has promised, how will a Labour government react given that Health Secretary Wes Streeting has already kept the previous government’s ban on the use of puberty blockers for children?

On more structural questions, Starmer will face a choice all British prime ministers have tried to avoid: does he align Britain with the US in its struggle for global supremacy with China, or try to carve out a European third way? Britain, France and Germany tried this when Trump pulled the plug on the Iranian nuclear deal in his first term, only to find that they were powerless to escape the economic power of the US. When Britain attempted to continue using Huawei to build its 5G network, despite Trump’s warnings, Boris Johnson was forced into line because Trump simply imposed technological sanctions that Britain could not escape. Expect a similar pattern to play out all over again, even on the thorny issue of Ukraine, where Europe is unlikely to be able to make up the shortfall should Trump decide to pull the plug on US support for Kyiv next year.

If anything, Trump is far more powerful today than he was in 2016, and we in Europe are far weaker. Trump won an undisputed electoral mandate, backed by a likely Congressional trifecta and a more radical, coherent and thought-through ideology developed by organisations such as the Heritage Foundation. Europe, in contrast, looks lost and leaderless, weakened by war and geopolitical competition, and no longer comforted by the idea that Trump is just a passing threat. In Germany, the government is broken and likely to be replaced within months, its economic model ruined by the loss of reliable energy from Russia and high-end manufacturing competition from China. In France, Emmanuel Macron is a shadow of the self-appointed Trump whisperer who bestrode the world stage in 2016. And in Britain, Starmer already looks weakened after the struggles of his first 100 days in office.

The question at the heart of all this, then, is whether there will be an emergence of Trumpism here in the UK, much as Thatcherism went hand in hand with Reaganism. The conditions that gave rise to Trump are, if anything, more pronounced here than in the US: with record levels of immigration, years of economic failure and a growing sense that the British state is in some fundamental sense broken beyond repair.

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Trump senses British weakness

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Such a view, ironically, is already shared by many of those inside No.10 who have already come to see the creaking, mice-infested building of No.10 Downing Street as a symbol of Britain’s failed state. There are a number of senior figures close to Starmer who have even concluded that the building is not suitable as the hub of a 21st-century government and needs to be closed down, and turned into a ceremonial museum. The day-to-day running of government, for its part, would be moved to the Treasury, Foreign Office or even the Home Office. The question is not whether this would be a good idea in practice but whether the government can afford the upheaval.

The central irony of Starmer’s project, then, is not simply that it is trying to address many of the same concerns as Trump — from immigration to gender and globalisation — but that it is also beginning to share the same instinct that something has fundamentally broken in “the system” which needs fixing, or, perhaps, “draining”. For Starmer, and those around him, the question is not how to distance themselves from Trump over the next four years, but how to prove to voters that they don’t need to vote for a British version of him to address their concerns here. Biden, Harris, Scholz and Macron have all tried to do the same and failed. It would be a brave man to bet Starmer will be any different. It didn’t end well for Cleopatra either.

This captures so much of today’s strangeness. A great jolting reality check has once again been delivered to all those who convinced themselves that something else was in store because their gut — or their centrist prophets — had told them so.

Many of us have spent the past few months watching the great American drama play out on our screens, wondering what it was that we were missing in this supposedly transformative figure of Kamala Harris, destined to prosecute Donald Trump out of history — even potentially with a “blowout” victory for the ages.

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Trump senses British weakness

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Harris was deeply impressive, we were told. She spoke to the soccer moms of America. The suburbs were rallying behind her. Her choice of Tim Walz was inspired. She was brat. The Republicans were weird. Nancy Pelosi was a genius for getting rid of Joe Biden. Biden was a giant who had saved American democracy. Abortion was the issue which would crush Trump. And yet, here we are. Fox has called the election. Donald Trump will be president again — only this time with a new electoral coalition behind him that has the potential to transform American politics not just for a term, but for a generation.

And here’s where I depart from McCarthy. While there certainly seems to have been very little to the story of Kamala Harris, the climax of the Trump show does tell us something about what the world is becoming.

This is not 2016, it is something more seismic. That first Trump election was but a tremor it seems, the disaffected white working class merely the first group to break from the old order before the stampede to come. This time, Latinos, African Americans and the young appear to have followed suit, with as many as one in three minority voters backing Trump. For so long we have been told that demography is destiny and that the Democratic Party was en route to an unbeatable rainbow coalition, as if the policies they were offering did not matter. That narrative should now be put out of its misery, Canadian style.

Harris was a poor candidate with almost no discernable message, parachuted in to save an unpopular administration on the unbelievable basis that she did not offer continuity but, apparently, change. It was a fundamentally bogus offer.

It seems remarkable to say it, but Trump was the substantive candidate in this election offering a critique of the incumbent’s record. What was the Harris message of this election? What was the substance of her trade, immigration or foreign policy? What was it that she offered other than the fact she was not Donald Trump? She was an actor, a cypher. By the end, her offer amounted to a single issue: abortion. It wasn’t enough.

For much of the past decade, Trump stalked his former party with messages about the border, trade and “woke”. The Democrats knew the threat and nominated Joe Biden as a holding figure in 2020 who would see off Trump before passing on the baton to the next generation. And then, it turned out, there was not a new Biden able to assemble the old Democratic coalition. Now an entirely new one needs to be assembled.

Trump is currently on course not just to win the electoral college (a plus 95% chance according to The New York Times) but the popular vote itself, a scenario deemed implausible only yesterday. It looks like he will sweep all the battleground states and more besides. Though this is no Reagan landslide, Trump is making inroads far beyond his 2016 base. He is winning in the New York suburbs and among conservative immigrants.

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Ultimately, Joe Biden was right that his vice president was a weaker candidate than he had been and Obama was before him. Harris was weaker than Hillary Clinton, too. The Democratic Party’s presidential nominees are getting progressively worse. Some Democratic analysts were arguing overnight that Harrris had been denied the time to introduce herself to the American public. But this only reveals the depth of their denial. Biden was no longer fit for the presidency and would surely have lost by an even greater margin, yes. But Harris was only as plausible as she was because she was parachuted in at the last moment. It is surely the case that the emptiness of the drama she offered could only be sustained for the mini-series we got.

Trump on the other hand seems to have improved as a candidate. He has honed his message without abandoning its essential themes. He was no longer promising to ban all Muslims arriving in the US or promising to get Mexico to pay for a border wall. Yet everyone knew that voting Trump meant tighter immigration restrictions, protectionism, anti-wokery and opposition to foreign entanglements: a potent combination in any democracy. It may not be true, but that was the message.

This is important because America means something in the world beyond its borders — and not just because of its power. It acts as a great distorting mirror, offering an image of humanity that can appear grotesque in its violence and inequality and churning, revolutionary individualism. But like any good caricature, it captures something about humanity in its endless, anarchic strife. Trump horrifies many outside the United States, but like Tony Soprano or Walter White, all the more so because they see something in him that they recognise. He is a portent. Harris is little more than her caricature on SNL.

For years, it has been the European Left which has been taking its politics from America, adopting the manners and assumptions of the imperial hegemon, seeking its respect. Now, surely, it will be the Right which is empowered, much as happened in the Eighties. The European Union is already following Trump’s protectionism and immigration instincts. With Giorgia Meloni in power in Italy and Kemi Badenoch stalking Keir Starmer in Britain, expect a coalescing of Western conservatism.

What now for the homeless centrists? What of the podcast kings for the liberal left-behinds who were predicting a Harris sweep — or even for the polling chiefs running 80,000 simulations showing Harris marginally winning in some implausibly precise number? My prediction: they will remain and they will continue to herd.

Even before the results started coming in, Nate Silver was accusing pollsters of “backfitting their data to match the polling averages, regardless of what the survey actually said”. And yet, this is what we all pored over before the election, instead of concentrating on the policies of each candidate and how they will affect the lives of those inside and outside the United States. For the false prophets, there is, of course, the consolation of decline, the idea of history still moving in an ordered direction — with them being on the right side, of course.

For the next four years, though, the great American drama is back with a dark new series. A new story is unfolding. We are back in Trump’s world and we don’t yet know what he is going to do with it.

To an American living through the election season, things look very different. There’s nothing secret about the American psyche these days. Kamala Harris describes former president Donald Trump as “unstable and unhinged”, and compares him to Hitler. And he describes her as having “the mental faculties of a child”.

Enright’s worry that voters are not listening to politicians marks her as a Harris person; Trump people tend to see the problem as politicians not listening to voters. The American elections pit a party of the System (Harris’s Democrats) against a party of the Electorate (Trump’s Republicans). Naturally, worried foreigners will rally to Harris’s side. They know the American system, depend on it, and get all their news from it. They don’t generally know the American electorate and don’t think they depend on it. They might be about to discover they are wrong. Recently there were hopes for a reconciliation between the country’s raging electorate and the elites who run its sputtering system. With less than two weeks to go before Americans count their ballots, those hopes are likely to be dashed.

Time will tell whether Kamala Harris was an adequate pick to replace Joe Biden, once his age-related incapacity could no longer be concealed. But the method of her selection sealed the public’s understanding of Democrats as the party of monied elites — not a good thing to be this year. Concealing Biden’s condition required the collusion of the whole party, Harris included. It wrested the choice of Democrats’ 2024 candidate from rank-and-file voters and delivered it to the party’s billionaire backers in finance, entertainment and tech. The party is taking on a fat-cat profile. It has relied on ruses to hand-pick its presidential candidate in the past three elections. In 2016, the officially neutral chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, worked behind the scenes to see off the socialist Bernie Sanders’s challenge to Hillary Clinton. In 2020, donors and strategists, desperate to unify the party factions against Trump and (again) to thwart Sanders, rescued Joe Biden’s failing candidacy by purging other moderates. Biden’s win was a vindication of their tactics. But they damaged the US — because the factions that made way for Biden would all have to be paid off when Democrats took power. The Biden administration was a junta of special interests — Black Lives Matter, immigrant and transgender activists, green-energy moguls, neoconservatives — without, we now realise, any guiding intelligence at its centre. Keeping these special interests together has cost money. That is how the American debt has rocketed to historic highs.

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As a president is supposedly powerful, it was assumed that ousting Biden would require his assent. It didn’t. Once Biden stumbled in a debate last June, a funding strike called by the entertainment and finance billionaires did the trick. Cartoon heiress Abigail Disney, cryptocurrency billionaire Mike Novogratz, Netflix founder Reed Hoffman cut the party off until it agreed to replace Biden at the top of the ticket. In a sense it doesn’t matter which politician the system chooses. The party belongs not to voters but to interest groups, as it did between the Gilded Age and the reforms that democratised the nominating process in the early Seventies.

Donald Trump has turned that into a liability for Democrats. Working people remember fondly the economy as Trump ran it in the three years before the Covid emergency. It was not perfect: growth was lower than under Obama. But it was better distributed. The lowest quarter of workers saw their real wages rise by 5% under Trump, the first sustained improvement for the working poor since the 20th century. The great polling surprise of the 2024 election — the highest Republican support among black males since 1960 — is more plausibly explained by concrete economic achievements than by the intangible factors that pundits usually adduce, from Trump’s “ghetto” ostentation to his troubles with the legal system.

Gains for the working class proved unsustainable under the Biden Administration, amid a flood of 7.5 million illegal immigrants. If one episode could sum up the whole campaign season, it would be the exchange between Trump and Harris, during their televised debate in September, over allegations that Haitian immigrants were — in the Trumpian phrase that launched a thousand remixes — “eating the pets of the people that live there”.

Judged as a contest, the debate was an outright victory for Harris: a drubbing, a shutout. Trump is lazy (he obviously did not even outline a closing statement), ignorant (he did not seem to know what a “bill” is), inarticulate (there were moments when he was nearly as woolly as Joe Biden was in the embarrassing debate performance that drove him from the race).

But Harris’s victory was Pyrrhic. The issues Trump raised, however inarticulately and inaccurately, cut in his favour. Many American swing voters understand that the opening of the country’s Southern border was brought about by concrete actions urged by the immigrant-activist wing of the Biden “junta” and undertaken by executive order in the very first days of the administration in 2021.

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But most Americans had no idea until Trump started going on about eating cats and dogs that there were so many places like Springfield, Ohio, a withering industrial city of 58,000 people that has received 12,000-15,000 Haitians in the last year or so. That sounds like a “minority” problem, but as Germans discovered after Angela Merkel’s invitation to refugees from the Syrian war in 2015, such newcomers are disproportionately young and male. They can become a majority in the public spaces during business hours. They can wind up laying down the law. This does not mean they are violent or even rude. They just have the force that cohesive groups of men naturally possess in the prime of life.

Many of the Springfield newcomers have rent subsidies and food stamps, and — this being the United States — a heavy carapace of rights and protections that derive from civil rights law. When you inject a federally subsidised population of 15,000 people into a small city that has not seen new housing construction in many years, natives’ rents get driven through the roof. American workers have reason to fear competition from workers who were formed in a country where the per capita income is barely $1,600.

Distant people in positions of authority sometimes accuse voters in places like Springfield of grumbling. You can see why: no one ever sets out actively to screw the natives. It’s just something “the market” does to them while the mayor and the federal government are busy patting themselves on the back for their generosity. Under such circumstances, the besieged-feeling viewers of the Trump-Harris debate might well have preferred the guy who sputtered and turned red at the very thought of Springfield to the lady who read her lines and kept her composure.

Regardless of whether he wins the presidency, Trump has won a victory in the argument about immigration that he introduced on the day he announced his candidacy in 2015. It is also a loss for elite-led campaigns of shaming and ostracism. Clearly “Woke” — that set of moral proscriptions about diversity, backed up by the power granted by civil-rights law to harass and disgrace refractory citizens in the courts — has lost much of its power to intimidate. The Trump campaign’s single most powerful television ad shows Harris passionately telling a transgender interviewer that she would back publicly funded sex-change operations for prison inmates. “Kamala is for they/them,” the ad closes. “President Trump is for you.” The Pew Center recently reported that there are more registered Republicans than Democrats for the first time since it started tallying these numbers in 1992. In the closing days of this campaign, three Democratic senators in tight races who had voted to impeach Trump twice — Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, Bob Casey in Pennsylvania — hurriedly cut TV ads implying that their own positions on immigration were the same as Trump’s. Those who lived by the sword of woke are now dying by it.

We are getting a better idea now of why half the country is willing to be led by a man whose personality would have unfitted him for leadership at almost any previous juncture of American history. Trump’s seeming indifference to policy, a sign of unseriousness at other times, looks like a savvy refusal to be taken in. His vulgarity can look like a post-modern kind of authenticity. After making a crude joke about Kamala Harris’s husband at a Catholic gala in New York, he stared down at his printed speech and admitted others had prepared it for him — something an American politician never does. “That’s a nasty one,” he muttered. “That’s nasty. I told these idiots that gave me this stuff, that’s too tough.” Bizarrely, at times like these, Trump seems like the only sincere political figure in an otherwise rigidly scripted system.

Pandering politicians often assign a set of policy opinions to the citizenry, and then take a bunch of phoney positions to match them. Harris, discovering that swing-state voters like cars and guns, has presented herself in the campaign’s final days as a Formula 1 enthusiast (a backer of Sir Lewis Hamilton) and a gun owner — a gun fanatic, even. “If somebody breaks into my house they’re getting shot,” she told Oprah Winfrey. After not holding a single press conference in the first two months of her campaign, the teleprompter — which she used even at such traditionally impromptu occasions as voter town halls — became a symbol of her campaign.

And Trump’s strange sincerity may be why the various attempts to prosecute him have not been fatal. On the contrary. Harris commonly calls him a “convicted felon”, but what has he been convicted of? A business misdeed so small, so obscure, and brought to a verdict by a process so partisan, that it would be more accurate to say Trump had been designated a criminal than proved one. No Trump opponent has ever managed to explain his offence in a convincing way.

One factor both in blunting the propaganda effect of criminal prosecutions against Trump and allowing the enemies of Woke to rally together has been the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk two years ago. It is not that Musk is in Trump’s corner, although he (stridently) is. It is that, in this election cycle at least, Democrat-aligned tech executives have been unable to slow the movement of narrative-disrupting stories through the news ecosystem — as they were able to do in 2020 with stories concerning the laptop of wayward presidential son Hunter Biden. Under heightened scrutiny American elites are finding it harder to stick together than they did back then.

The question arises of whether these same elites can hold the country together well enough to continue to exercise what they like to call “global leadership”. The answer appears to be no. If the world has become a much more dangerous place under Biden, it owes partly to how he was nominated. Among the interest groups that won a free hand in the 2020 coalition of anti-Trump forces was a bipartisan group of neoconservatives — foreign-policy thinkers who rose through the system under the “democracy promotion” agenda that led Bill Clinton into Kosovo and George W. Bush into Iraq.

They have drawn the United States (and its allies) into a proxy war in Ukraine that the West cannot win without an active Nato military involvement that would be reckless in the extreme. Reckless because, at the core of the Western military/diplomatic system, the American public is too badly divided ideologically to commit to a war anywhere. In January, it is true, President Biden gave a State of the Union address in which he likened both Vladimir Putin and the Republican opposition to the fascists who were on the march on the eve of the Second World War, and yet, with the help of Republican House speaker Mike Johnson, he passed a $60 billion aid bill for Ukraine.

But such bipartisanship is unlikely in the future. As things now stand, Johnson would pay with his career for any future collaboration. Harris is less connected to pre-Trumpian hawks than Biden was, even if she has received the endorsement of Dick Cheney. Trump’s vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance is a stalwart opponent of the Ukraine war. And Trump’s own bizarre reminiscences at a late October rally of threats he allegedly made to Putin are neither believable nor the basis for a bipartisan foreign policy.

This is especially since the parties, one representing the raging electorate and the other the sputtering elite, have not been so at odds in a long while. Americans may yet have a future as leaders of the free world. But that will have to await an end to the conflict between Republican populists and Democratic elitists, a conflict that 5 November is more likely to exacerbate than resolve.

The idea of working at McDonald’s generally carries this meaning in American culture. It’s one option of a tough choice, part of a bargain that’ll probably be a bummer either way. It’s McDonald’s or unemployment. McDonald’s or welfare. McDonald’s or getting kicked out of your mom’s house. Ice T’s depiction of this bargain is extreme in its terms, but it captures something that, even when the choices aren’t so stark, often attaches to the McDonald’s option — a hint of shame, because you’ve tumbled into the unhappy trope. You’re workin’ at Mickey D’s. It’s not really the worst job you can have, but, when people think of the worst job you can have, a lot of them think of McDonald’s. The idea of working in the back flipping burgers and dunking fries in spattering grease is pretty bad. But, especially for someone like Ice T’s ghetto hustler, working in front has to be much worse. Standing at a cash register when your boys roll in, wearing a brown uniform and a paper hat and mouthing an obsequious question scripted in a distant office, must be something like the existential death Hegel imagined in his master-slave dialectic, when the man who values survival over status surrenders himself to the man who values status over survival.

Given all this, it’s wild to see a campaign battle between America’s two presidential candidates over which of them can more believably claim the exalted mantle of having worked at McDonald’s. In case you haven’t kept up with the drama, it grows from a claim by Kamala Harris that, during the summer of 1983, she worked at one in Alameda, California, where, she’s said, she “did fries”. Harris first mentioned her McDonald’s job in 2019, and has brought it up several times this year. Alas, no one has produced reliable evidence to confirm this item from her work history, and Trump has seized on this tiny epistemic void, her McDonald’s job hovering in its limbo of unconfirmability, to mount his own much splashier, much Trumpier claim: Harris is lying about having worked at McDonald’s. And then, to more fully exploit this moment of uncertainty, Trump visited a closed McDonald’s in the small town of Feasterville, in the swing state of Pennsylvania, and exuberantly pretended to work there for 15 minutes. The crowds outside, Trump said as he dunked sliced potatoes in boiling grease, were huge. His very brief McDonald’s stint was a big success.

Now, the first question to clear up, the question Ice T’s hustler would probably want answered, is why the hell anyone would pretend to work at McDonald’s, or lie about having worked there, or brag about it at all, however honestly. In Harris’s case, there are two slightly different answers. In 2019, it would have made sense as a way of appealing to the progressive voters she thought controlled her path to the Democratic presidential nomination. Working at McDonald’s would be a badge of low or oppressed status, especially for a female or uterus-having candidate of colour, and badges of low or oppressed status were valued highly by progressives of the time, especially when worn by people who are also, in the more conventional terms of education and employment and cultural refinement, undeniably high status. In October 2024, the calculation is slightly different. Instead of advertising her erstwhile low status as a fast-food worker, as a way of cementing her claim to high status as a progressive politician, Harris would like her former job at McDonald’s to endear her to the working-class voters she needs in crucial swing states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan. (That “working class” in Pennsylvania is now signified by a french-fryer job at a rural McDonald’s rather than unionised work in a Pittsburgh steel factory is something to pause over, I suppose.)

Trump’s calculations were more straightforward. The uncertainty around that 1983 summer job gave him enough (for him) latitude to accuse his opponent of lying, and Trump, a prolific liar himself, really likes to accuse his opponents of lying. Indeed, one suspects that Trump staged his 15 minutes of french-fry making fame entirely as a set-up for the punchline he delivered when he was finished — “I’ve now worked [at McDonald’s] for 15 minutes more than Kamala.” Several times, while speaking out the drive-through window to friendly reporters, he repeated that Kamala had lied about her McDonald’s job, while also lying about McDonald’s confirming his claim that Harris was lying. It hadn’t confirmed this.

For me, Trump calling Harris a liar on this seemingly trivial point is irresponsible. I think you should have solid proof before you accuse someone of lying. Then again, I’m sort of pathologically credulous, dangerously slow to suspect the person I’m talking to might not be as childishly earnest in conversation as I am. Lying is destructive of communicative trust, but so is accusing people of lying.

Yet Trump’s accusation does have a little behind it. Reporters friendly to the Harris campaign have produced one person who backs up Harris’s claim, but only third-hand. That is, an old friend of Harris’s when they were teenagers remembers Harris’s mother later saying something about Kamala having worked at McDonald’s. Media have treated this bit of hearsay as serious evidence, but you only have to imagine the tables being turned to see how little evidentiary work it really does. If it were Trump, in other words, reporters would roll their eyes. And the Washington Free Beacon provides a big enough stack of circumstantial evidence that Kamala haters can keep believing what they believe already, and others with more open minds can reasonably wonder if this might be a case of stolen fast-food valour after all.

For example, a job at McDonald’s seems like something Harris would have eagerly discussed in her two autobiographical books, which strain to present her as a plucky product of a humble upbringing. But neither book mentions it, even though, as the Free Beacon notes, her 2019 campaign biography These Truths We Hold “devotes a chapter to the struggles of the working-class and assails the service industry’s ‘starvation wages'”. Not brandishing such a shiny autobiographical nugget in this discussion does seem uncommonly modest for a presidential candidate.

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And why have we heard nothing from Harris’s sister Maya, the Stanford-trained lawyer who earlier worked on Harris’s campaign, and who’d have been a teenager when Kamala was supposedly working at Mickey D’s? Smells generate some of the strongest memories, and making fast-food french fries is notorious for how it leaves people smelling. One of my best friends in high school worked at our town’s A&W, the chain of drive-in hamburger joints famous for its root beer. I remember him smelling exactly like french fries when he got off work. Does Maya Harris remember her big sister smelling like french fries when she got home from her summer job at McDonald’s?

No one seems to have asked her, which points to a depressing side-issue. Uncertainty around Harris’s summer job in 1983 has presented a sort of test to elite media, and they have failed. With Trump rushing in to exploit this uncertainty and rake in a huge pile of free and favourable publicity, while littering the ground with his own lies and partial-truths, they’ve responded in a way that exhibits, as if in pathological symptoms and uncontrollable tics, a chronic syndrome in their journalism. A New York Times article from last Sunday is a prominent example. Its sub-headline says: “Donald Trump has claimed without evidence that Ms. Harris never worked at the fast-food chain. Her campaign and a friend say she did.” This is echoed in the body of the piece: “Lacking a shred of proof, he has charged that she never actually worked under the golden arches.” In these formulations, a political campaign’s mere assertion and one woman’s memory of something Harris’s mother told her at some unspecified time count as proof, while all the circumstantial evidence amassed by the Washington Free Beacon doesn’t even count as evidence.

And you can see the Times trying to sculpt their one piece of substantiating evidence so that it looks more solid and imposing than it really is. The article states that “Waanda Kagan, a close friend of Ms. Harris’s when they attended high school together in Montreal, said she recalled Ms. Harris having worked at McDonald’s around that time.” This makes it sound as if Ms Kagan has conveyed a direct contemporaneous memory of Harris and her job. But in the next paragraph we read, “Ms. Kagan said that Ms. Harris’s mother, who died in 2009, had told Ms. Kagan about the summer job years ago.” So, Harris’s close friend Wanda Kagan knows that Harris worked at McDonald’s because, at some later date, Harris’s mother told her? Not Harris herself? This seems like the sort of curious, murky account of a live issue that a self-respecting reporter would try to clarify a little further, but the Times presents the Wanda Kagan story as if it settles things, as if there’s no journalistic need to corroborate that story by, say, contacting Maya Harris and probing her olfactory memories, asking whether she remembers a smell of french fries from the summer of 1983.

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In a long thread on X, conservative media reporter Drew Holden includes this article among a startling number of examples of news outlets giving snide, niggling, gratuitously skeptical commentary as they reported on Trump’s McDonald’s performance. Holden portrays these as “outrage porn”, but, with a few exceptions, it’s not really outrage we’re seeing. It’s fretfulness and worry. It’s helplessness. As I said above, it’s panic.

Theoretically at least, there was a journalistic balance to strike when Trump pulled his McDonald’s stunt. The press could have done its reporting from the sidelines, quoting Trump’s accusation that Harris lied about working at McDonald’s while noting that such a strong accusation should be backed up by something like proof. They could have, as they have done, reported that Trump himself openly lied when he said that McDonald’s has confirmed his claim about Harris. They could even have reported some of Trump’s odd behaviour has he pretended to fry those sliced potatoes. They might have described his awkward movements, his odd and yet familiar fixation, before all that boiling grease, with the size of the adoring crowds surrounding the humble restaurant. They might have related how he made a big, germaphobic deal about the special technology McDonald’s has for making sure those sacred potatoes are never touched, never despoiled, by “the human hand”.

They could have done this while also conceding that Harris’s claim about working at McDonald’s is indeed light on corroboration. Instead, they’ve seemed desperate to put themselves in the action, to undo Trump’s (sleazy and undeserved, if also enviable and impressive) PR triumph through sarcasm and bad framing, while pretending that obvious questions about Kamala Harris’s McDonald’s story have been answered, when they haven’t. The media have, thus, looked like they’re trying to weaken Trump and protect Harris. They’ve looked, in other words, like they’re a little freaked out, a little scared that a faithful telling of this McDonald’s story might help him win. It’s not exactly the Hunter Biden laptop story, but it kind of feels like the Hunter Biden laptop story.

I have my own suspicions about Harris’s claim, and I’m obviously a little disgusted with how the press has handled it. But I can’t help feeling sorry for her. She had no way to foresee the Trumpian Kung Fu she was opening herself up to when, truthfully or not, she claimed she once had a low-status fast food job. The most clairvoyant politician or political strategist could not have anticipated what Donald Trump, with his greasy and smelly methods, would make of the greasy and smelly mythos of the lowly job at McDonald’s.

It’s a sorry episode all around, but maybe it’ll have an upside. Maybe all the political bragging about having a job at McDonald’s will kill the stigma that attaches to this essential work. And maybe, in the future, on their way to higher education and better jobs and happy lives as successful adults, some larger number of young men will end up flippin’ burgers and dunkin’ fries at Mickey D’s, instead of trying their finite luck as ghetto hustlers.

It’s all too easy to miss the early warnings of an impending disaster. Today’s culture wars are often interpreted as the symptoms of an ephemeral fad. Most can feel the tremors — restrictions on free speech, public shaming of those with unfashionable views, regressive identity politics masquerading as “progress” — but there is a widespread sense that if we ignore the problems, they will simply disappear. But what if these rumblings presage something far worse to come? What if, like the people of Pompeii, we are at risk of civilisational collapse but are misinterpreting the signs?

Further tremors have reverberated recently with renewed attacks on the First Amendment to the US Constitution, perhaps the final bastion of free speech in the West. Speaking at the World Economic Forum earlier this month, former Secretary of State John Kerry argued that when it comes to “disinformation”, the “First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence”.

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Labour's war on free speech

By Andrew Doyle

The First Amendment codifies a “negative liberty”, not a licence for certain behaviour but rather a protection from government interference. It reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” It can function as a kind of barrier to the worst excesses of the illiberal Left, even at a time when their party of choice occupies the White House.

Such challenges to the First Amendment began around 10 years ago with the emergence of the Critical Social Justice (or “woke”) movement, which sought to promote equity according to group identity through authoritarian means. In March 2018, an article appeared on the website of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) which noted that by this point it was “common” for Leftist activists “to call for lower legal protections for speech”. The writer concluded that such calls were misguided, describing the First Amendment as “our most powerful tool to keep the government from regulating the conversations that spark change in the world”.

But other activists took a different view from the ACLU. In 2018, two of the founders of Critical Race Theory, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, republished their 1997 book Must We Defend Nazis?: Hate Speech, Pornography, and the New First Amendment. This version of the book was modified according to the shift in activists’ demands, and the subtitle was now Why the First Amendment Should Not Protect Hate Speech and White Supremacy. In that same year, activist and legal scholar Justin Hansford argued in the Yale Law Journal Forum that, when it comes to race, the “marketplace of ideas” does not apply. “When ideas on race that would disrupt the racial hierarchy of white over Black emerge,” wrote Hansford, “the First Amendment is disproportionately applied to trample that dissent”.

The “woke” movement had always taken a pro-censorship stance, but by 2018 the First Amendment was clearly identified as the key obstacle to their aims. This was developed further in The Cult of the Constitution (2019), in which legal scholar Mary Anne Franks took aim at “First Amendment fundamentalism”. An entire chapter was devoted to what Franks calls “the cult of free speech”, a chilling phrase that recalls Labour MP Nadia Whittome’s belief that “we must not fetishise ‘debate’ as though debate is itself an innocuous, neutral act”. Authoritarians frequently resort to this kind of sophistry rather than admit outright that they find the concept of free speech inherently rebarbative.

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In October 2019, former editor of Time magazine Richard Stengel continued this disturbing trend with an article for the Washington Post entitled “Why America needs a hate speech law”. Stengel rehashed the typical concerns about “false narratives” and “lies”, as though any kind of speech regulator could possibly be immune from deceptive or misleading behaviour. He also repeated the “direct effects theory” which posits that people act on cue from social media posts, even though more than six decades of research into media impact on public behaviour has seen such notions fully discredited. The First Amendment, Stengel argued, “should not protect hateful speech that can cause violence by one group against another. In an age when everyone has a megaphone, that seems like a design flaw”.

A snobbish mistrust of the masses lies at the heart of the opposition to the First Amendment, a feature that we can trace to the Frankfurt School and the French postmodernists of the Sixties, two groups that have substantially influenced the philosophy behind Critical Social Justice. According to this view, popular culture has created a society of unthinking clones. What Herbert Marcuse described as the “one-dimensional man” is irredeemably blind to his own subjugation and reacts mechanically according to decrees from above. According to this perspective, “hate speech” has the power to rile up one group against another, even though the evidence for this claim is scant.

Those of us familiar with the concept of the “long march through the institutions” will be aware that these theories take time to percolate and to infect the mainstream. John Kerry’s recent remarks would suggest that First Amendment scepticism has finally made the leap from academic activism into the political sphere. Whether it gains traction in its new home should trouble us all.

The signs are not promising. This week, Hillary Clinton weighed into the debate during an interview with CNN. “We should be, in my view, repealing something called Section 230,” she argued, referring to the section of the Communications Decency Act introduced in 1996 that protects online platforms from liability for comments posted by users. Without these protections, big tech would have little choice but to implement draconian censorship measures. The consequences for free speech, in the de facto public square of our digital age, would be catastrophic.

Clinton stopped short of a call for a ban on “hate speech”, but how long before other mainstream politicians are echoing Kerry’s assessment of the First Amendment as a “major block”? There was a telling moment in the recent vice-presidential debate, in which Tim Walz interjected to claim that “hate speech” is excluded from First Amendment protections. The remark was so fleeting that it was not even included in the official CBS News transcript, but it was perhaps the most significant moment of the evening. If the Democrats are triumphant in the election, Americans will be governed by an administration that does not believe the First Amendment is fit for purpose.

History teaches us that legal proscriptions against offensive viewpoints do not have a mitigating effect; bad ideas that are driven underground tend to fester and multiply. We also know that laws against offensive speech soon become expanded to incorporate any viewpoints that are not approved by those in power. In 1644, John Milton published his Areopagitica, a counterblast to the Licensing Order of June 1643 which decreed that all printed texts be passed before a censor in advance of publication. In this essential defence of liberty, he pointed out that censors do not “stay in matters heretical” but inevitably broaden their remit to “any subject that is not to their palate”.

Once a state has been empowered to set the limits of speech, to introduce legislation against vague and indefinable concepts such as “hate” or “offence”, the groundwork for future tyranny is firmly established. One thinks of Juvenal’s famous question: quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (who will watch the watchmen?). Kerry, Clinton, Walz et al seem to believe that those in authority can be trusted to distinguish between fact and fiction, but this was roundly disproved during the Covid pandemic when the lab-leak theories, now widely accepted as credible, were censored as “disinformation”.

Any attempt to carve out exceptions to the First Amendment for “hate speech” will inevitably empower the state to curb freedom of expression at will. The hopelessly subjective notion of “hate” means that this will be tantamount to a censor’s charter, a means by which political opposition can be stifled with the backing of the Constitution. As more and more political figures are willing to openly question the validity of the First Amendment, the threat to free speech in the West is now palpable. The tremors are becoming more frequent, and we ignore them at our peril.

The shrewd strategic moves began early. As soon as the doddery Joe Biden was evicted from his party’s ticket, the Democrats immediately rallied around his successor, with Biden himself endorsing his vice president as he shuffled to the door. Making Harris the candidate by acclamation, instead of having a “mini-primary” served several purposes. It demonstrated the unity of the party behind the new candidate, even as the nomination of a woman who is of black and Asian descent ticked off multiple boxes in identity politics, minimising the risk of defections by the identity-obsessed Left.

Was the last-minute swap of Harris for Biden — after the latter’s disastrous performance in his debate with Donald Trump — a coup by powerful Democratic donors and power brokers such as former president Barack Obama? Perhaps. But as the old saying goes, “politics ain’t beanbag”. The complaint by Republicans that the Democrats should have indulged a chaotic convention was so blatantly self-serving that nobody took it seriously, least of all Republicans themselves.

The switch, at any rate, had an immediate effect, reversing Trump’s erstwhile advantage in the polls and putting Harris comfortably ahead, a lead she’s retained. The presidential race was transformed from one between a vigorous if obnoxious candidate (Trump), and one who is demonstrably incapable (Biden). It’s now a fight in which the 78-year-old Trump is the flailing maniac and Harris the younger and relatively normal politician.

It’s true that Harris is famously inarticulate, whipping up word salads with the skill of a master chef. But even that reinforces her relative normalcy. So far, the Harris campaign has shown that it has learned from the mistakes of Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016. The former California senator has not yet dismissed a quarter of voters as “a basket of deplorables”, as Clinton did in her infamous speech eight years ago. And unlike Clinton, Harris hasn’t neglected the Midwest, with its swing votes in the electoral college.

The widely ridiculed phrase “the politics of joy” to describe Harris’s banal and conventional campaign was rapidly abandoned. But the opposite of the politics of joy is the politics of fear, which Biden had made central to his floundering campaign. And unlike Biden, Harris has not made saving democracy a major issue of her campaign. Nor has she gratuitously offended millions of Republican voters by describing them as “quasi-fascist”.

Politics 101, in its American guise anyway, teaches that during general elections nominees should compete to win the political centre. Ever since her installation as the Democratic Party’s substitute presidential candidate, Harris, despite her long record of far-Left positions on social and cultural issues, has been sprinting to the Right as fast as she can. Consider guns. Rebutting accusations that she’s soft on crime and hostile to the Second Amendment, Harris has highlighted her own gun ownership, telling Oprah: “If somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting shot.”

Another lesson of Politics 101 is that parties should try to win over independents and split the opposition. The disciplined, professional Harris campaign has been following the book in both respects.

To appeal to independents, Harris has been emphasising her support for abortion rights. And to win over disgruntled Bush Republican voters, dismayed by the rise of Trump and the populist Right, Harris has gone so far as to praise Dick Cheney. Despite being denounced by many Democrats as a war criminal, Cheney announced he would vote for her instead of Trump. Harris, for her part, was quick to thank the former vice president, praising him for “what he has done to serve our country”.

Not since the Nazi-Soviet Pact have so many Leftist heads exploded. But the cliché about politics and strange bedfellows remains as true as ever.

The competence of the Harris campaign is also evident from what she’s left unsaid. In her earlier political career, and as a product of the Left-wing San Francisco Democratic machine, Harris had been identified with hard-edged racial identity politics. Before dropping out in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, Harris attacked Biden for his erstwhile opposition to busing, common in the Seventies to achieve quota-based racial balance in public schools. It was a policy so unpopular that even progressive Democrats stopped talking about it years ago.

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In her presidential campaign, however, Harris wisely has taken care to distance herself from identity politics. Her campaign has not emphasised her black and Asian ancestry, nor has she made breaking the gender glass ceiling central to her campaign. In this, again she’s repudiated the example of Hillary Clinton.

Have Kamala Harris and her aides run the perfect campaign? Even though she has done an interview with tough questions on 60 Minutes in addition to being interviewed by friendlier hosts like Oprah Winfrey and Alex Cooper on the Call Her Daddy podcast, some in the media fault her for not doing more interviews with major media organisations. But then they would, wouldn’t they? To date, the interviews apparently have not hurt or helped in the polls, and as long as she has a respectable lead over Trump, Harris would be foolish to risk open-ended interviews in which something she said could be used against her. In any event, anyone who still hasn’t decided between Harris and Trump are probably “low-information voters” who pay little attention to politics — and so are unlikely to be swayed by wonkish proposals on tax benefits.

If, moreover, the Harris campaign has been a masterclass in how to run a presidential campaign at short notice, the opposition offers lessons in how to blow a lead. When it became clear that Trump would be the Republican presidential nominee for the third time running, many Republicans hoped that America and the world would see a “new Trump” — more disciplined and less abrasive.

In the event, their hopes were dashed. The wheels came off the Trump campaign bus during his speech at the Republican convention, when he squandered much of the goodwill he had gained after the assassination attempt, characteristically launching into a rambling and self-centred diatribe. Since then, Trump has thrashed about without gaining traction, as it has become clear that his lead over the deposed Biden reflected Biden’s unpopularity, not support for him.

In his televised debate with Harris, for instance, Trump engaged in bizarrely anachronistic red-baiting: “Her father’s a Marxist professor in economics, and he taught her well.” On his Truth Social account, and channelling Joe McCarthy, Trump riffed on the same theme. “Comrade Kamala Harris is terrible for our country,” he said. “She is a communist, has always been a communist, and will always be a communist.” It goes without saying that this kind of stuff may play well with the lunatic fringe. But when Trump should be appealing to undecided moderates, it counts as political malpractice, especially when Harris herself is totally at home on the corporate wing of the Democratic party alongside Hillary Clinton and Wall Street.

Nor did Trump stop there. An even greater example of political ineptitude was his questioning of Harris’s race — “Is she Indian or is she black?” — in front of the National Association of Black Journalists. This rhetorical incontinence is all the more self-defeating, of course, given that growing numbers of black and Hispanic voters have been casting their ballots for Republicans, though majorities of each group still support the Democrats.

With Trump as their standard-bearer, the Republicans cannot take advantage of Harris’s inanity. Trump himself seems unable to make a coherent case for his own candidacy. Quite apart from his own foibles, meanwhile, Trump’s choice of running mate also illustrates his failings as a candidate. J.D. Vance may impress even his opponents with his mastery of detail — but much of that comes by comparing the Ohio senator with Trump himself.

Will their different styles of campaigning translate into similar personal styles of governing? Probably not. In the case of Kamala Harris, who has hastily sought to reinvent herself as a bland and uncontroversial centrist during the campaign, pressure from progressive interest groups along with her own instincts would probably cause her to move to the Left on policies like immigration and climate change if elected.  In the case of Trump, his shambolic first term suggests that in a second term he would be as undisciplined as a chief executive as he has been as a candidate.

If presidential campaigning were an Olympic sport, then, the Harris campaign would bring home the gold. But in spite of her competence, she could still lose in November. As always, swing states are key. And though she’ll almost certainly win the popular vote, as the Democrats have done in every election bar one since 1992, a handful of voters in Pennsylvania or Wisconsin could yet deny Harris her prize.

One factor here is the “shy Trump voters” — and who knows how many there are. But a more important factor may be the burden of the last four years. Harris has had to signal that her presidency would be different, without criticising the Biden administration in which she served as vice president. The most effective criticism the Trump campaign has made against Harris is therefore this: if you propose doing this or that now, why didn’t you push for it as vice president over the last four years?

And then there’s the fickleness of voters, which can defeat even the most professional of campaigns. American political operatives are fond of the fable of the dog food company whose executives held an urgent meeting to discuss why an advertising campaign to sell their newest product had failed. After a number of senior executives had proposed various possible explanations, a junior executive speculated: “Maybe the dogs just don’t like the dog food.” In just a few weeks, the Harris campaign will discover whether America’s electoral canines are fans of what they’re offered.

The details of the “scandal” are murky. Was the relationship, as Nuzzi claimed, limited to her sexting? Did Kennedy boast about having “intimate photos” of her? Did the inappropriateness really start after she wrote a piece about him? Whatever the answers, the affair has been filed away with all the other instances of Kennedy’s outsized existence: the worm in his brain, the dead bear he found in Central Park and arranged in a pose as a prank, his beheading of a dead whale in 1994, the revelation that he has had dozens of mistresses during his several marriages.

It was only natural that the media cover with single-minded intensity the trivial matter of a reporter’s professional infraction — once the media becomes its own subject, nothing short of nuclear war can distract it. But the question of why Nuzzi, a skilled and seemingly sober political reporter, should risk her professional existence for a dalliance, whatever its degree, with Kennedy, is intriguing. Because it’s not just Nuzzi who became magnetised by RFK Jr. Until Kennedy dropped out of the presidential race as a third-party candidate last month, throwing his support to Trump, much of the country was riveted by him.

America’s two-party system effectively functioned so long as the country was more or less defined by tense but clarifying polarities: coastal city and heartland small town, north and south, industrial and agricultural, rural and urban-suburban — even, at a certain post-war point, suburban vs everyone else. Democrats and Republicans sometimes shifted their different constituencies, but the shift occurred along clear ideological or geographical lines.

But the dissolution of American small towns, the conversion of cities from affordable, if gritty, havens to gleaming, exorbitantly priced enclaves, the rise of the increasingly unaffordable suburb in every region, the head-spinning transformations of the information economy, the new centres of gravity spawned by Silicon Valley and the digital revolution — all have made the two-party system nearly irrelevant and almost totally dysfunctional. If ever a country needed a parliamentary system, in which its increasingly fractured reality could resolve itself into a cohesive factionalism, it is the Not-So-United States of America. But the two-party system will never be dislodged from American life. American idealism needs the conceptual simplicity of two parties the way it needs a simple framework of good and evil.

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The night Trump lost the election

By Lee Siegel

The result is Donald Trump, the first of what is sure to be many party leaders who are barely of their party at all. In this American moment of hybrid cars, and sexually hybrid people, and hybrid work-patterns, and hybrid economies, American leaders are also becoming hybrid as their party’s frameworks disintegrate.

Trump is, clearly, composed of stark contradictions: a populist cosmopolitan, a louche devotee of God, a tribune of both the moneyed class and the working class. In her understated, endlessly self-correcting, self-adjusting and repositioning way, so is Kamala Harris, whose withdrawal from public scrutiny is an invitation to be all things, no matter how contradictory, to all people. Both Harris and Trump, then, are de facto third-party candidates breaking the boundaries of what their parties stand for, as they appeal to a country whose various boundaries — geographical, economic, cultural, personal — are being broken apart and reconfigured every day.

Enter RFK Jr, who was, for a time, the thing itself, the political figure the entire country has been waiting for, the very figure each party both fears and longs to assimilate and cultivate: the synthesising, unifying, bold and original alternative to a desiccated two-party system.

Kennedy’s announcement, in April 2023, that he was going to challenge Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination struck terror into the party. And for good reason. Kennedy had all the trappings of the deus-ex-machina hybrid candidate. He was, nominally speaking, a staunch liberal Democrat. But beneath that, he embodied the power of legend thanks to his lineage; unlike Jeb Bush, he was not merely a dynastic descendant, but a mythic transcendent, his family history well-shrouded in the manifold mysteries of the past. Most important of all, though, he possessed a rare and precious energy that has vanished from the American scene. He represented a counterculture. More specifically, he embodied the essence of a counterculture. He was a walking, talking “Fuck you”.

America has always thrived on countercultures, in politics, society and the arts. But in politics, it hasn’t had one since the Sixties. Occupy Wall Street couldn’t even come up with a leader’s face to put on its often-admirable sentiments. In society, a counterculture hasn’t thrived since the various waves of feminism and gay rights, the LGBTQ movement being a set of ultra-refinements. Black Lives Matter? BIPOC? More ultra-refinements. The entire woke movement was a commercially restless status quo simply turning over on its side.

The absence of a counterculture in art is even more telling. From America’s Ashcan artists, to abstract expressionism, the Beats, pop art, and the Happenings of the Sixties, America’s defiant art movements often fuelled, to one degree or another, its political and broader cultural changes. But for the past 50 years, as titanic sums of money overtook art, society, culture and politics and put even the most diabolical American energies at the disposal of PayPal: Zip. Nada. Rien. Nichevo. The last time any American came close to hearing a consequential, beautiful, original, startling, profound “fuck you” was, probably, when Ben Kingsley pronounced the first of those two words with two syllables on that semi-countercultural phenomenon, The Sopranos.

If, on every point of the political spectrum, that chthonic phrase seems to be at the core of people’s politics, if casting a vote has now become synonymous with throwing a punch, it is because America has been, for the past 50 years or so, in search of a counterculture. Unable to find it in art, popular or high, people turn politics into a form of art brut. And since the heart of a counterculture has been to confront structures of power with the simple, deconstructing, levelling fact of biology — King Lear’s “poor bare, forked animal”; Montaigne’s “kings and philosophers shit” — it is no wonder that “blood” and “murder” are often on Trump’s lips, it is no wonder that he is consumed by the idea of immigrants cooking and devouring household animals. “Fuck you” is, after all, the fundamental biological act. But it has been RFK Jr who has elevated biology to its preeminent countercultural role.

Kennedy’s entire politics are centred on biology: his anti-vaxxer convictions; his warnings about cancer-causing cellphone towers and radiation; his belief that endocrine disruptors — chemicals found in plastic and pesticides — are affecting children’s sexual development; his certainty that emotionally blunting psychiatric drugs are behind the rise in school shootings. The bear and the whale, and even the seemingly compulsive sex, are run-offs from his political and intellectual obsessions. The promise of the countercultural turn to biology is twofold: the chance to clear away rotting structures of civilised power by returning to “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart”, and the sheer democratic power of being physical, which is a gift everyone possesses. For a brief span of time, Kennedy seemed to offer both.

Kennedy is gone from the national scene now, felled by character flaws that are as fascinating to analyse as they are impossible to tolerate. No one wants Sardanapalus to be president of the United States. But his popularity is proof of concept: America is teeming with Olivia Nuzzis, vulnerable to the seductions of outlaw defiance. Hybrid outsiders will continue to make their way to the increasingly accessible inside of American politics until, one day, if things keep declining as precipitously as they are, the American eagle is replaced, to the huzzahs of Bacchanalian voters declaring Year One, with that legendary icon of a once-flourishing counterculture: Marcel Duchamp’s urinal.

Urban senses that Pennsylvania, the nation’s key tipping point state, is slipping away. He fumed to me: “Trump had the big positions, the vibes, and the themes. But with Harris there are no themes except: we are not Trump and abortion.”

Flipping the script, it is Harris who now leads Trump in Pennsylvania and a series of key battleground states. But some knew this before they saw the polls. Sam Talarico, chairman of the Erie County Democratic Party has the pulse of the swing county of the nation’s swingiest state. With Biden as the nominee, Talarico witnessed a trickle of volunteers. Once Harris topped the ticket, a flood commenced. Talarico told me: “People are calling and asking, ‘what can I do?’ Canvassing and phone banking are way up. And interest is way up. There was a lot of energy that was just released once the change [Biden to Harris] was made. It is exponentially different.” And as Erie goes, so goes Pennsylvania — and with it the White House.

With money and energy, Talarico now has eight full-time staffers and dozens of volunteers. And Erie is merely a microcosm of the fundamental vibe shift in American politics. I spoke with Joe Morris, an Erie-based political science professor, who sees in the polling what Talarico senses on the ground. He told me: “Harris has completely changed the dynamics of the race. At this time, the Trump campaign is at a loss for how to manage this.” Even more ominous for the Republican is Morris’s interpretation of the political mood: “To beat a movement, you need a movement. Harris is on the threshold of being a leader of a movement, like Obama in 2008 and Trump in 2016.”

Urban’s political Spidey senses are tingling. A Harris movement, like Obama in 2008, would mean her candidacy has come to represent “change” to voters in what is most certainly a “change” election. Harris would then float above the political flotsam. This would spell political doom for Trump whose only chance at victory is an ugly slugfest in the mire. The race is still winnable for Trump. But the Harris vibe, immense crowds, record fundraising, and grassroots energy, has distracted the boss. And a distracted, sullen Trump is his own worst enemy. Urban griped: “Trump is one of the most gifted politicians, but he is also one of the most flawed. He is incredible at connecting with crowds, but he is also incredibly ill-disciplined.”

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In the weeks since Biden left the race, Trump’s utter lack of self-restraint has been on full display. His rants about the Vice President’s racial identity and vulgar social media posts have merely fuelled the Harris momentum — and vibe shift. For Urban, Trump’s self-immolation is especially galling. He knows that Harris’s liberal record makes her politically vulnerable with Erie County and Western Pennsylvania’s normie voters. He advised, “All the Trump campaign has to do is focus on the issue. If we make this about the issues, Republicans win.”

Urban is surely onto something. In Harris’s truncated 2020 presidential campaign, she delighted the progressive fringe with gun buy-backs, fracking bans, and the Green New Deal. These positions, to Urban, loom as Harris’s political Kryptonite in Western Pennsylvania. A smart pol, the Vice President has pivoted to the centre. Urban said of this: “Those are some mental gymnastics that Olga Korbut would be proud of.” But he knows that Harris’s liberal centrism is good politics. That’s why he growled: “If we listen to her [now], she sounds like a fuckin’ Republican.”

And that’s important — because while policy obviously matters, “vibes” reign supreme. Years ago, Peter Hart, the veritable Yoda of Democratic pollsters, explained why George W. Bush defeated Democrats whom voters deemed more intelligent and knowledgeable: “voters value ‘I Like’ over IQ”. If vibes didn’t precede ideology, Hillary Clinton would be finishing her second term.

It is losing campaigns and candidates who cry “stick to the issues”. Winning presidential campaigns capture the vibe by the political alchemy of personality, first, and policy, later. Like a first date, a voter must get “the feels” before they entertain the wonk of inflation reduction or stories about your awkward brother.

Urban’s “stick to the issues” steals a page from a long cast of liberal losers. In the Fifties, liberals noodled over the riddle of sustaining party loyalty in an era where old fidelities had faded. Southerners were no longer automatically voting Democrat. Northern white ethnics increasingly ignored political bosses. The liberal egghead answer was “programmatic liberalism”. In this equation, voters would decipher the meaning of issues to their own lives and vote accordingly. For the Democrats, voters were like Star Trek’s Spock or AI.

Since the Sixties, a bevy of well-intentioned liberals placed policy at the forefront of their campaigns. Nixon, Reagan, the Bushes, and Trump were the result. Liberals lose because they underestimate humanity’s frailties and foibles. Conservatives win because they don’t.

The latest political science affirms this reality. Voter behaviour is dictated by emotions just as much as rational choice. Even those of us with fancy degrees are influenced by “vibe” and “tribe” more than we admit. Obama’s healthcare-for-all and Iraq War posture mattered. But he, more than Sarah Palin or Chris Dodd, dressed, talked, and lived like your coolest professor from graduate school. Plus, Obama signalled a definitive vibe turn from the Clinton-Bush era. For upwardly mobile professionals, voting Obama was tribe and vibe first, policy came second.

That’s why David Urban is partly right but mostly wrong. Kamala Harris’s 2019 policy positions should cause West Pennsylvania normies to wince. This is why Urban is begging Trump to frame the race as a choice between policy visions. But he admitted to me: “[Trump] is terrible at talking about his policy accomplishments. When he is off-prompter he is much more fired-up about the hand-to-hand political combat.”

Trump wants the political combat because he knows, more than anyone, that vibes are key. In 2016, he tapped into the nation’s sour mood and launched a movement. He, like Professor Morris, sees a nascent counter movement on the Left. Trump understands what Urban knows is true but hopes is not. The vibe, like the Dude in The Big Lebowski, always “abides”.

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But to boost the political feels you need campaign nuts and bolts. In 2016, the Clinton campaign ignored Erie County and Western Pennsylvania, while, in 2020, Covid prevented much face-to-face canvassing. So, for 2024, Talarico is touting a “coordinated campaign” that combines his staff with a recently opened Harris office, one of 14 across Pennsylvania. Terron Sims, who helps lead the Democratic National Committee’s vote mobilisation efforts, boasted to me: “When it comes to grassroots get-out-the-vote campaigns, no one beats the Democrats. We have professionals and super volunteers who have been doing this for decades.”

And the issue for Trump is, while he understands the value of vibes, he doesn’t see that they mean less without political organisation. A local Democratic strategist admitted that the GOP’s local dysfunction fuelled Biden’s 2020 win in Erie County. Four years later, the Erie County Republicans might have new leadership, but sources report “major beef” between Trump forces and area Republicans. Local Republicans pay rent to the Trump campaign for a bit of space at the local headquarters, an arrangement that a Democratic official described as “odd”. The Harris campaign, who have the opposite agreement with local Democrats, seem to have it the right way round.

Conflict is to Trump what the sun is to organic life. But as in 2020, dysfunction could prove decisive in a close race. Urban pointed to Trump’s disregard for mail-in early voting as greatly hurting the Republicans. In the 2022 US Senate race between Mehmet Oz and John Fetterman, Pennsylvania Democrats banked 1.5 million early votes. The Democrats had won before election day. Urban, obviously frustrated with how “Trump derides early voting”, advised that “Republicans need to play by the rules in the commonwealth. We need to ensure that the voters of colour who are for us are registered.”

By mid-October, millions of Pennsylvanians will have cast their ballots. Trump has weeks to stunt the Harris vibe. In Erie and Pennsylvania, it is vibe and organisation, not the issues, that will decide this race. For now, both decisively point to Harris.

Americans have suffered bruising blows for four years now: the Covid shutdown, urban riots and crime, ballooning inflation and debt, open borders, civil strife, the gloating of our enemies and the collapse of the international order. The electorate is weary and dispirited, and seems ready, like a boxer on his last legs, to take a sweet nap on the canvas. 

Kamala Harris’s handlers understand this perfectly well. Having accurately discerned the national mood, they have made her the woman of the hour. She seems to float above all weighty issues. In her campaign poster “Forward”, a knockoff of the iconic Obama “Hope” image, her uplifted gaze radiates joy and “upliftment”. Her invocation of “What can be, unburdened by what has been” is happy and hopeful.

If all that sounds attractive, consider that Harris’s candidacy involves a deep memory-wipe. Politically speaking, she has sprung into being as a fully formed adult with no discernible past or historical recall. Her plan to control food prices repeats a common, famine-inducing error of communist regimes. Her tough-on-crime and border-securing persona rests not just on amnesia, but on media-driven amnesty. And yet, propelled forward by the cheerful drone of the “KHive ” and the good vibrations of “Brat summer”, Harris may surf all the way to the Oval Office.

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However, she won’t get there without the votes of one crucial constituency: the Lotus-Eaters, a mythical tribe now found right here in America.

In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus and his crew encounter the Lotus-Eaters at a moment of great vulnerability. After 10 years of grinding war, the Greeks had finally defeated the Trojans and sacked their city. Pushing off for home with Trojan women and loot, Odysseus’s 12 ships were driven off course by strong winds to the land of the Cicones, an actual historical tribe, where they sustained heavy losses in a pitched battle. Then they narrowly avoided total destruction amid “a howling, demonic gale”. Making for the western isle of Ithaca after the weather cleared, they sailed south to Cape Malea, where the fingers of the Peloponnesus extend into the Mediterranean.

But they were far from home. After a tantalising glimpse of native soil, they were torn out to sea by high winds and a ripping tide. Nine days later they arrived, “bent with pain and bone-tired”, in the Never-Never Land of the Lotus-Eaters. By then, they must have wanted only to lay their heads on the sand and sleep. Mental and physical exhaustion had prepared them to ingest the Lotus, a “honey-sweet fruit” that left the body intact but wiped away the mind.

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The Lotus-Eaters didn’t attempt to kill the men Odysseus sent to scout the land. They don’t seem even to have spoken with them: they “simply gave them the Lotus to taste”. The fruit induced profound forgetfulness. Those who ate it “no longer wished to report back or return” to their shipmates. They ceased to care about anything or anyone. They desired only “to remain with the Lotus-Eaters, feeding on lotus, and to forget about their homeward journey [nostos]”.

Nostos is the root of “nostalgia”, the pain associated with the thought of home. Odysseus’s men must have felt that pain intensely. The Lotus was for them a powerful analgesic, precisely because it induced a kind of total amnesia. For home is not just one thing among others. To forget about home, to cease to feel its deep tug, is to forget about everything: spouse and children, farmhouse and fields; the city of one’s birth and the graves of one’s ancestors; “the ashes of one’s fathers and the temples of one’s gods” — all that, held in memory, inwardly nourishes involuntary exiles by giving hope and meaning to their struggle and suffering.

This amnesia is not just personal. It wipes away all patriotic feeling, all care for the polity that gave one life and liberty. It annihilates cultural and historical memory, the rich topsoil of the past from which all future growths spring. All that remains for those who ingest the Lotus is a sterile present. More than that, its effect is metaphysical: it obliterates the pith and ground of our individual and collective being. Nostos and nous, “intellect”, both derive from an Indo-European root meaning “return to light and life”. The Lotus kills all spiritual and intellectual effort to uncover transcendent, humanly essential truth and to rescue it from oblivion.  

This is not to say that some degree of filtering — forgetting or ignoring things better left in the dark — isn’t essential to life. Every living thing, Nietzsche observes, “can become healthy, fruitful, and strong only within a horizon”. But when our horizons contract to the infinitesimal dimensions of the vanishing present, we are condemned to idiocy. This is the work of the Lotus, a potent symbol of the forces that today militate against memory: censorship, identity politics, ideological litmus-tests, the erosion of free speech, the replacement of education with indoctrination, and the noise of our digitally-distracted age, which drowns out whatever authentic and prophetic voices might otherwise still be heard. 

Today, the Harris campaign has cleverly repackaged oblivion as a panacea. Forget about the spirit of Tennyson’s Ulysses, who urged his men “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”.  The way forward, we are told, is to lay down our citizenly oars — to forget where we’ve been or where we thought we were going, and submit to being carried along in a joyful stupor by the ship of state. Never mind that it’s unclear who is steering that ship, or the destination they have in mind. 

In Homer’s epic, Odysseus dragged his scouts away from the Lotus, lashed them under the rowing benches, and once again took to the heaving seas. Ours, though, is an age not of heroes, but of know-nothings and buffoons who wish only to take us for a ride. This is more the stuff of comedy than of epic. Many would agree, of course, that it would be tragic to succumb to the political equivalent of a lobotomy. Yet in the blank and leaden eyes of those who have traded their human past and future for a zombie-like narcosis, such an exchange would not rise even to the dignity of error.

An avuncular and sharp-witted persona, Walz ticks the right boxes when it comes to winning the Electoral College. He is a popular Democratic governor from the upper Midwest, a crucial battleground region, and has received ringing endorsements from the AFL-CIO, UAW and other trade union organisations. He is also a muscular surrogate who has already put Republicans on defence over J.D. Vance’s “weird” cultural views.

Perhaps most important, Walz is a white old-school liberal who speaks to the “kitchen table” concerns of working-class voters anxious over living costs and now the possibility of a recession. Though reliably progressive on issues such as abortion rights and LGBT equality, Walz seems to bask most in common-sense reforms like free school meals and paid family and medical leave that he and Minnesota’s Democratic state legislature passed into law. Well before he was a contender for the vice-presidential nomination, progressives of various stripes looked to him as an example of how Democrats should rebuild their brand outside the coasts

This record is an important asset for Harris. Throughout her term, she has struggled to lift public approval of the Biden administration’s economic agenda, reinforcing perceptions she is a lightweight on the administration’s signature industrial, trade and development policies. Many progressives, meanwhile, worry she is too enmeshed with the donor class and will wobble on Biden’s efforts to support organised labour and rein in monopolies. Walz’s presence at the very least assuages some of those concerns, even if vice presidents are hardly known for influencing an administration’s economic priorities.

At the same time, his elevation also provides some insight into how the campaign views the battleground states, particularly so-called Blue Wall states like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and the Sun Belt. In 2020, Arizona and Georgia padded Biden’s final total in the Electoral College, but only by razor-thin margins in each case. Some progressive strategists nevertheless believed these victories were a sign of things to come, and that Democrats needed to expand their support in the diverse metro areas and affluent suburbs of the South and West to make up for expected shortfalls in an ageing Midwestern Rust Belt. But Biden’s standing in the Sun Belt, especially Nevada and North Carolina, took a beating from inflation. As Biden’s poll numbers lagged behind Trump this spring before his fateful debate performance, it became evident that some combination of Midwestern states and Pennsylvania offered the clearest, and perhaps only, pathway to victory. By early July, however, even those odds of reaching 270 Electoral College votes had dwindled.

Harris appears to be a determined realist on this front. By ultimately declining to pick Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, another top contender for the VP slot, she has signalled her campaign is laser-focused on the swing states most in reach. Despite the challenges she may face as a female and biracial candidate, she recognises that the industrial Midwest still exerts a powerful hold on the liberal-Left psyche. In addition to Walz, Harris is therefore still expected to be aided on the campaign trail by two of her other potential running mates: Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who were feted by pragmatic progressives for repelling MAGA opponents in the 2022 midterms.

Of course, should Harris make up Biden’s lost ground in the region over the next couple of weeks, her fundraising will undoubtedly swell. That would allow her to divert some resources back to the Sun Belt and make a concerted effort to win Georgia, where Democrats still have the best chance of cobbling together an “anti-Trump” coalition in the South. That strategy, in turn, would likely bleed the Trump-Vance ticket of campaign cash in states that it still expects to win, while leaving Walz to venture deeper into Midwestern swing counties rich in working-class votes.

The selection of Walz is not foolproof, however. While he coasted to re-election in 2022 by a margin of almost 200,000 votes, his first term was rocked by the George Floyd protests, which led to extensive looting and property damage in Minneapolis. Conservatives are again claiming Walz did not deploy the Minnesota National Guard soon enough to contain the chaos, while some Left-wing activists remain angry over the limited policing reforms pursued by the state’s Democratic establishment. In an election that will be won on tight margins, Walz will have to quickly prove he can parry these sorts of attacks on the Right and the Left and keep the focus on Trump’s unfitness for office.

Another potential liability concerns the way blue cities and states handled the pandemic. Though many progressives adhered to stringent protocols, extended school closures and remote-learning policies in some cases put the Democrats’ traditional urban coalition of affluent professionals, black and Latino workers, and teachers’ unions under strain. In particular, wage-earning parents who could not work from home struggled to adapt to shifting policies, and research now shows that learning loss and absenteeism have been greater in those districts that did not resume in-school learning sooner. Although not an extreme outlier, Minnesota was also no exception to these challenges. Hence, as much as Walz was selected to bridge divides in the Democratic coalition and win over disaffected independents, the party which relies on robust turnout in all cities could suffer unexpected defections or poor mobilisation in key districts due to divergent experiences of the pandemic.

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To be sure, none of these vulnerabilities on their own are enough to drag down the Democratic ticket. Walz is the archetypal happy warrior of Midwestern liberalism, something the Democratic Party arguably needs more of. Still, it would be naive of progressives to discount the most obvious attack the GOP will deploy: that Harris is a “DEI” limousine liberal and Walz a feckless bleeding heart. Democrats are counting on Walz to deflect those volleys, but in the end the ticket will need more than Walz’s pugilistic talents to prevail in November.

In fact, Democrats should not overestimate the ways in which Walz “balances” the ticket. While Walz is expected to lend the campaign a much-needed everyman feel, the election will come down to the economic concerns that national Democrats have struggled to alleviate. Walz can help, but the top of the ticket needs to convey, with force, how it plans to tackle an across-the-board affordability crisis. As the party strives to unify a frayed coalition divided between pro-globalisation professionals, young identity-driven activists and progressive populists, it will take more than one man to show regular workers Harris has their interests at heart.